The Land of Roast Goose and Dumplings

Alexander Lobrano returns to the sleepy villages of eastern Slovenia, where family-run inns serve the best-preserved old-fashioned cooking of Mitteleuropa.

- Alexander Lobrano

After the scandal we’d caused, Janez, the tall waiter with a taut black vest fitted over his keg-shaped belly, decided to take me into his confidence. Pensively stroking his red shoe brush of a moustache, he came to clear my dessert plate, and then leaned in and spoke behind the fence of his thick fingers.

“You must go east if you want our best food, Mr. Alexander. Go to the countryside east of Maribor, my hometown. Go to the Štajerska and Prekmurje regions. That’s where the food in Slovenia is still good and honest and true.”

The scandal was minor but telling: The night I’d arrived at the faded grand hotel on the shores of Lake Bled where my grand-mother had once stayed as a young woman with a married lover, I’d blanched when Janez brought me a menu written to please the mostly middle-aged, mostly English clientele. I hadn’t come to Slovenia to eat tomato aspic and trout amandine. So as one food lover taking pity on another, he’d served me off-the-menu pršut, Slovenia’s excellent air-dried ham, and then a steaming bowl of jota, a tangy stew of red beans, bacon, potatoes, and sauerkraut, made by his wife, who was the cook in the staff canteen. The prissy maître d’hôtel had found my meal “inappropriate.” By morning in the whispery dining room, I’d become known as “that American man who likes peasant food,” a true honorific in my book. Now returning with my coffee, Janez handed me a folded yellow order slip on which he’d written the names of the two regions and the address for Gostilna Tramšek—gostilna means “inn” in Slovenian—in smudged lead script.